Techlines Today

The Bad in Email

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 3, 2006 ⋅ Tags: communications, email, reading comprehension

The guys over at Central Desktop Blog have a well-thought out piece where they discuss a number of short-comings surrounding email and its day to day use. I think most of us have some level of familiarity with a majority of their points, including:

• Email is NOT Secure
• Group Email is Really Complicated
• Email is Not a Document Manager
• Email Communications Do Not Correspond Priority
• Email is not permission based
• Spam Filtering is better, but still not good enough
• Email does not work well for multi-users

However, I think one point that was missed and definitely worth mentioning here – email (and this holds weight with other text-based communications) suffers from the difficulty in actually relaying what you are trying to say. How many times have you received a response to your email and questioned whether the person on the other end had even a minimal level of reading comprehension? Chances are, you are just as much at fault, indirectly!

Say what? When you’re speaking to someone face to face or even over the phone, a lot of information lies in your delivery. Facial expressions, hand gestures, voice infliction: they all provide context and are just as important in getting your message across as the words themselves. Contrasting, email lacks all of this. Writing an e-mail that your peer will understand the first time, both in tone and in content, takes a considerable amount time, effort, and skill. Haven’t you ever sent out a quick email and later realized the textual tone is abrasive and demanding? I know I’m not innocent in that regards.

Society as a whole has gotten better at this, and I suspect it will continue to increase as the generations that have grown up with IM and Email progress through the corporate world. However, cultural differences on the world-wide-web will exacerbate this point as more and more nations embrace technology in their day to day lives. So by no means are we out of the woods yet!

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